The GQ&A: Die Antwoord

For a band whose next single is called "Fok Julle Naaiers" (Afrikaans for "Fuck You All"), Die Antwoord’s Ninja and Yo-landi Vi$$er are kind of adorable. One’s two-feet taller than the other, and they get along like thug-nasty versions of Harry and Sally. To understand their chemistry, consult Ninja’s tattoo: "If you don’t like funerals, don’t kick sand in a Ninja’s face" and Yo-landi’s one-liner: "Do what I like ’cuz I roll with the fuckin’ Ninja!" Naturally, their South African rave-rap group went viral last year when the Internet discovered the bizarrely entertaining music videos for "Zef Side" and "Enter the Ninja" and spent months asking, So wait,are these guys for real? When I meet them at their publicist’s NYC headquarters, they still have those Vanilla Ice-inspired hairdos and they’ve brought along six new Die Antwoord tracks. So to answer that question of authenticity: It depends if living your art is still considered performing.

Since that fateful day on the Internet, Die Antwoord signed with Interscope Records, toured the world, and attracted covetablefilmmakers—not bad for what began as a meme. But the globetrotting left them dry. "It’s weird getting away from [South Africa]. It’s nice, but our juice comes from there," says Ninja, who describes his homeland as "really fucking buck wild." They queue up the new songs. A sampling: Yo-landi yelling, "Murder! Murder! Kill! Kill!"; South African gangster slang poetry; dubstep interludes; Mortal Kombat theme song allusions. Afterwards, Ninja says quietly, "We like that combination of ’pop’ and ’fuck you.’" Yo-landi nods and Ninja politely excuses himself to pee. He returns to debut their self-produced video for "Fok Julle Naaiers," which the record ecs are worried about. The clip’s strangely gorgeous, with black and white scenes depicting South African gangsters waving guns—throughout, Yo-landi is covered in butterflies. Meanwhile, on the table sit toy prototypes for Evil Boy, the group’s massive-schlonged mascot. The room contains a multi-media goldmine waiting to be excessively re-Tumblred and re-Tweeted. On the verge of completing their next album, called Ten$ion, Ninja and Yo-landi discussed Die Antwoord’s five-year expiration date, samurai philosophy, and the well-endowed Evil Boy.

GQ: So where have you guys been? I haven’t seen anything from Die Antwoord since the short film you made with Harmony Korine.

Ninja: We went home. Everything was little bit surreal. After traveling around so much, we couldn’t think of any ideas.

Yo-landi: It was hard to write or compose...we just had to go back and finish making songs. If we make 20 songs, we’ll throw away 10.

GQ: You said one of the new songs, "Money and the Power," was about how you’re squashed between two scenes in South Africa. What did you mean by that?

Ninja: I mean, South Africa’s very dangerous. It’s kind of weird: you’re a victim or, like, not a victim. No one calls the police; you call private security. It’s like a militaristic presence—that’s just the day-to-day, and we’re used to it. It’s weird getting away from it... It’s nice, but our juice comes from there. There’s this samurai saying, "Become the enemy." And I didn’t understand it at first, but ["Money and the Power"] is kind of based on that. If you’ve got a woman and children and stuff, you can’t be a fuckin’ runaway. In South Africa, you don’t really have a choice. And it’s not just in a particular area—the ghettos or suburbs or wherever—it’s really fucking buck wild.

The government was supposed to change everything and make it better; Mandela fought and did all this hectic stuff for so long—went to prison—and he came out like Gandhi, flipped it around, made it all nice. And now the new regime has come and they’re just completely bad people... Our president [Jacob Zuma] was charged with raping a chick before he became president, and she had AIDS. And in the press statement, he said he had a shower afterwards, so he wasn’t worried about it. The president was involved with all these dodgy arms dealers and was being investigated by the Scorpions [The Directorate of Special Operations], which police the government. And when he became president, he pulled all these moves—it was like this real freak-mode thing.

So I’m influenced by it, because I don’t want to be a victim of that looking after us and that coming after you in the dark, and everything in the middle... There’s a lot of this energy in our music. But we don’t want to tell this fuckin’ sad story around the world. We just want to see our luck and keep our hearts pumping. But we won’t leave South Africa; it feels weird to leave. There’s layers to our stuff: Our top layer is like candy-coated pop, because we want to party and have a nice time, but we also have a lot of different human experiences and other levels present in the Die Antwoord experience. Because you can’t be a sucker. Life’s just strange... You have to deal with shit like that. It’s fucking weird.

GQ: You’ve explained South Africa’s "Zef" movement as having style even if you don’t have money. Now that Die Antwoord’s come into some cash, does that make you feel displaced?

Ninja: That’s one aspect of the Zef thing, it doesn’t just mean that, but that’s how it was born. The money is just energy, it’s just a thing. It’s cool having a little bit of money to do your thing. Sometimes we can get a lot of money at any fucking second. We say "no" all the time. We’re in this weird little bubble where we just want to work with certain people. And all of a sudden, everyone wanted to work with us and give us money all the time, and we said no to a lot of things just so we could stay harmonious... We’re like a little private ecosystem.

Yo-landi: Money just helps fuel our stuff, but the essence of Zef—maybe what you’re talking about—is that, without money, you could still be stylish. Butwith money, you could be stylish even more. [laughs] So there you are.

Ninja: We had wings on our ankles before all this shit happened, when no one liked us or dug us or anything. We were like, This shit is the fucking shit, before anyone liked it for like a whole year. And then "Enter the Ninja" came out and "Zef Side" came for, like, fucking long, and no one watched them for months. And then, all of a sudden it went fucking mental. I haven’t had money for 20 years trying to do music, and I’ve been working with Yo-landi for, like, 10 years, and nothing, nothing came in...money for cheese and bread kind of money, like nothing for long. And then, from that date, there was just an overload of cash. And we noticed that taking cash from people was like concrete boots around the ankles instead of wings. The money’s fucking fun, but it’s kind of irrelevant, funnily enough. We went back to South Africa to shut off from all this stuff and return back to normal. That’s what this all is, the second chapter of Die Antwoord. But money makes things weird... You have to be careful; it’s like a fucking potent energy.

With Die Antwoord, we’re going to do five albums, maybe in five years, and burn fucking hard for that time. After that, we’ll start drifting into film. We’ve always wanted to do films. They asked Yo-landi to be in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but she didn’t want to do an American thing. And they asked me to be in a film by [District 9 director’s] Neill Blomkamp, Elysium, but I said I didn’t want to do an American film, and then they asked Eminem to be the dude. Eminem said he would only do it only if they shot in Detroit, but they’re shooting in Mexico, so whatever. And we’re working with Neill Blomkamp on...he did a weird thing; he wrote this script for a South African sci-fi based on Ninja and Yo-landi.

GQ: Is this film The Answer? I’ve heard you speak about it in the past.

Ninja: No, totally different from The Answer. [Neill Blomkamp] totally took the whole Zef thing and made it. And afterwards, there’s another film we’re working with him on that...I can’t really talk about it; it’s got all this NDA stuff about it. And then we’re doing our own feature films. So after our first album [$O$], second one is going to called Ten$ion, third is Yo-landi’s solo album called The Void, fourth is mine, and it’s called The Dominator. It comes out the same time as hers to see who’s more popular. [laughs] Yo-landi will probably win. And then the fifth one is kind of a secret thing. But during that time, we’re going to be making films, getting into that full-force mode. You can’t be new for too long. You want to just respectfully disappear. It’s a bit sad sometimes. Michael Jordan retired like a god, and then he came back... We don’t want to go out like that. It’s just this idea we had, like, Fuck, that would be cool, let’s try to do that.

GQ: So the Die Antwoord timeline is all figured out.

Yo-landi: We didn’t mean for it to be...but now we’ve got, like, a five-year plan.

Ninja: But to make five fucked up albums is really rare...like classic, classic, classic shit? You don’t get that a lot.

GQ: And in the meantime, you’ll also be making toys. I’ve seen an old video of you sewing together these plush animals called Chommie Toys.

Ninja: Yeah, it means, like, "Your best friend." It’s your chommie.

GQ: They were really cute—you had a giraffe, a little bat, a panda...and now you’re making this toy you call Evil Boy, who has really huge dong. What happened?

Ninja: [laughs] All that stuff we did before Die Antwoord was experimental. It was cool, but you’re a human and then you make this art, and people have a relationship with the art. And all the other stuff I did before was like, Oh that’s cool, and then I’d get bored of it in two seconds, and then I didn’t have a connection with anything. I think that’s why we called it Die Antwoord—The Answer—because this is the hottest thing; we want to do this forever, I love this. And that’s the difference. Everything else kind of died away. So Evil boy’s our first mascot. He our first toy, and I’m proud of it. It’s from a prison tattoo that I saw on someone, drawn a little more retarded than this.

Yo-landi: It was drawn like shit.

Ninja: It was drawn like fucking shit. This toy’s really fucking cute. It took a long time to get it like this [picks up toy and waves its penis around] Like, "Hey, what’s up!" It’s friendly. We’re really working with this fine-tuned, Japanese company called Good Smile. They make toys that take two years to come out, because they’re so psycho... They’re really good sculptors. Evil Boy’s our mascot forever.

GQ: What makes Evil Boy evil?

Ninja: I don’t know, he’s got a secret... This one [points to a white prototype of the toy] glows in the dark. When you switch off the light at night, he looks after you while you go to sleep to have a nice dream.

GQ: What got you interested in toys in the first place?

Yo-landi: ’Cuz they’re cool!

Ninja: We were into toys full-force. Funnily enough, I think Ninja and Yo-landi almost came out as toys in our mind. We wanted to make super versions of ourselves. This guy Dave Choe, he connected us with the toy company, and he was like, "Yeah, they’re going to fucking love you guys. You look like toys anyway."

GQ: Right, previously you’ve said you thought of Ninja and Yo-landi as manga characters who have all these imaginary adventures.

Ninja: It’s not really imagined, it’s just our lives. South Africa’s all there, like a gold mine in a funny way—all the stuff I’m telling you is totally normal. [South Africa’s] just badly presented. America’s got amazing presentation, especially New York—the most potent, strongest, concentrated, amazing presentation. The gangster culture in South Africa—Sexy Boys, Playboys, Fancy Boys, Nice Time Kids, and one of the biggest is called the Americans—base their style on American gangster movies, like, full-on, because the presentation’s so juicy. So with us, we’ve been very influenced by American presentation, but we’ve got a fucking gold mine of fucking tweaked-out, freak-mode shit that occurred. I feel we’re really good at the presentation of our lives. There’s no imagined adventures we need to have. These fucking real life things are more of a kick.

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